Behavior monitoring and altering systems focus on encouraging a particular patient behavior, whether that behavior is to stop an unhealthy activity, such as smoking, or whether that behavior is to encourage a healthy activity, such as exercising, dieting, adhering to a prescribed medical treatment regimen or maintaining a regular scheduled intake of medication, e.g. insulin. These systems often focus on an individual and that individual's behavior, resulting in a regimen of behavior tailored for that particular person.
However, in the context of chronic disease management, as more and more people are recovering outside the purview of human interaction, there is an increased risk that a prescribed regimen will be ignored. As today's lifestyle has become increasingly busier and fast-paced, there remains very little time for an individual clinician to ensure that a particular recommended regimen is followed by his or her patients. Furthermore, there is no guarantee that two people with similar conditions will respond to a monitoring system, and its accompanying recommendations, in exactly the same way. For example, in the case of two individuals who wish to stop smoking, many individual-specific variables will determine the likelihood of success that either individual has to actually achieve the goal of stopping smoking, such as their lifestyle or their availability to the monitoring system, such as their accessibility to a communication medium for reporting back to the monitoring system. Additionally, there is no guarantee that either individual will be more successful than the other at stopping a smoking behavior.
Many behavior monitoring and altering systems are established solely around a pre-determined behavioral regimen and do not evolve according to the individual's needs. Other than through institutional changes, these behavior monitoring and altering systems do not take into account that individual's behavior or whether other similarly situated individuals have been successful at a particular behavioral change.
Therefore, a need exists for a behavior monitoring and altering system that not only evolves according to an individual's behavior and responses, but also takes into account the likelihood of success of that individual achieving his or her desired goal as compared with other similarly situated individuals and encourages that individual into achieving his or her desired goal.